No Moment of Zen: Viacom Takes Daily Show off Hulu

Coming next week, Daily Show fans won’t be able to watch Jon Stewart’s show on Hulu anymore, according to a report from the New York Times Media Decoder blog. Comedy Central parent Viacom apparently wasn’t happy with the revenue Hulu was able to bring in for them, and it decided to exclusively distribute the show through its own web properties. Also affected by the move is The Colbert Report.

Hulu’s SVP of Content and Distribution Andy Forssell acknowledged the break-up in a blog post:

“In the past 21 months, we’ve had very strong results for both Hulu and Comedy Central, in terms of the views and revenue we’ve generated, thanks to a couple of key trends. First, more and more of our viewers have voted with their time by making these shows a regular part of their day. And second, we’ve driven steadily increasing revenue per view as advertisers voted with their budgets to take advantage of innovative ad formats and very strong advertising effectiveness. After a series of discussions with the team at Comedy Central, though, we ultimately were unable to secure the rights to extend these shows for a much longer period of time. “

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have consistently been two of the most-watched programs on Hulu. We’ll have to wait and see whether the site will be able to break the billion views barrier it easily surpassed in December without the two shows in months to come.